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Revolution Train |
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Turn Up The Fuzz |
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PETER HOPE & DAVID HARROW Blue Electric
In 1985, Peter Hope of The Box teamed up with David Harrow, electronic musician, who had previously worked with people like Anne Clark. Together they recorded an EP of 4 songs entitled Sufferhead. It came out on Ink Records, and can be considered amongst the best in both artists' catalogue. 28 years later Hope and Harrow teamed up once more to record another Sufferhead EP, this time a self-released digital download only. 2 years later, at the 30th anniversary of Sufferhead, Klanggalerie asked the musicians to record a new full album and here it is. The music on Blue Electric is a beat driven affair with Peter Hope's standout vocals. The days of extravert singing are gone, Hope has now settled for a much quieter style. David Harrow provided beats that range from hip hop to avantgarde. A Sheffield funk album like it was still 1985, with, of course, a much modern approach. You'll love this of you're into the Cabs, Hula or Chakk. Press text: Thirty years after their first EP, the now classic Sufferhead, Peter Hope & David Harrow finally drop their debut album! And it’s a corker! Marrying 80’s style arpeggiated synths, seriously inspired cutting edge beat-craft, full spectrum bass and great underpinning melodies with savvy lyrical wisdom and rich vocals.!
Between them Hope & Harrow have easily had more than a hundred releases over their long careers and have never stopped working and pushing forward with pioneering music. !
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David Harrow kicked off with synth-soaked new wave and Neue Deutsche Welle, defining a techno blueprint with poet Anne Clark, onto the San Francisco disco scene, through going deep into dub and experimental electronics as part of On-U Sound and PTV, through the dirty rave haunts of London with Andrew Weatherall, through huge international tours with The Orb, through a huge pop smash with Billie Ray Martin, through his live drum’n’bass extravaganzas, through the filmscore world, on through the Californian dubstep and weird-beat scenes to the esoteric ambient soundscapes and percussion sketches.!
Peter Hope first stretched his tonsils with Sheffield’s avant punk hipsters The Box, collaborated with Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard H.Kirk, Sweet Exorcists & All Seeing I’s DJ Parrot, 808 State, Ex- Comsat Angels band Soup, released several albums as Flex 13 with avant-garde legend Charlie Collins (ex-Clock DVA), redefined a twisted new blues with his solo projects, the most recent being released on Sun Araw’s Sun Ark label, and has even thrown his weight behind Austria’s legendary Der Blutharsch.!
These guys will never stop looking for some fresh and inspired form of music through which to channel their wealth of creativity, so it’s kind of fitting that it’s taken 30 years to ‘get round’ to making BLUE ELECTRIC, an album deep with familiarity but never looking backwards, always searching for a new way to look at the art of making music. Tracklist: 1. Blue Electric Light 2. Revolution Train 3. Soil 4. Lunacy 5. Turn Up The Fuzz 6. Tongue-Tied 7. Monstermind 8. I Am Spartacus 9. Through The Window 10. Revolution Train (Remix). Price: € 9,-/copy incl worldwide shipping.
Not the first time they’ve got together, but here’s next chapter in the musical marriage of David Harrow’s synthetic exercises and the cold spoken vocals of past Richard H. Kirk collaborator / Exploding Mind man Peter Hope.
Judging by Hope’s past work you’d expect this to be a lot more stark and thin than it is, but perhaps it’s the presence of Harrow behind the machines that drops some welcome colour into the mix. It creates quite a strange contrast; Hope breathes on about maniacs in charge and boiling seas while a peaceful synth merrily arpeggiates little blips in the background. It’s this that can make or break it for you - some will want strictly EBM / industrial dirges underneath their blokey subversive chat, some will welcome the melodics with open ears.
(Norman Records, August 2016)
Efektem tego okazał się album „Blue Electric”. Przynosi on jedenaście nagrań łączących zgrabnie echa brzmień lat 80. z nowoczesną rytmiką. Brytyjczycy sięgają przede wszystkim po chłodne electro („Revolution Train”), ale od czasu do czasu również po sprężysty dubstep („Turn Up The Fuzz”). Nie brak tu jednak rozwibrowanej elektroniki wywiedzionej wprost z klasyki Kraftwerku („Lunacy”). Wszystko to Hope ozdabia ekspresyjnymi wokalami, kojarzącymi się ze Stephenem Mallinderem („Tongue-Tied”) lub Markiem Stewartem („I Am Spartacus”).
Mimo przetworzonego śpiewu i chmurnej elektroniki, to chyba najbardziej przystępna płyta w dorobku obu artystów. Wszystkie utwory mają zwarte i rytmiczne brzmienie, a przy tym ozdobione są wyrazistymi melodiami. Podrasowanie tego wszystkiego na electro-popową modłę sprawia, że muzyka ta tchnie ciągle modną nostalgią za latami 80. Tym razem przywołują ją jednak weterani tamtejszej sceny elektronicznej – mamy więc do czynienia z oryginałem, a nie współczesną podróbką.
(Nowa Muzyka, October 2016)
Blue, Blue, Electric Blue… tripping out on the u-bahn. “Blue Electric Light” is retro-futurism, taking a razor to spoken words, spun out over sparse yet perfectly-matched Kraftwerkian beats, crackling and fizzing in unsettling rolling synth-lines, a relativity of accelerating beats. Europe endless, subways, ripped posters, tube-trains, travel, displacement, rootlessness, not belonging, perpetual meditation, all systems going going gone, strange lights flowing through frequencies in urban blue shift, eddies of sound that bleep, pulse, echo, ping and wow into the static. The album might operate on the Soft Cell voice-plus-boffin principle, but similarities halt there. There’s the clinical purity of Roland 808 and Juno 106, but Peter Hope’s voice is sired by Howlin’ Wolf during a voodoo eclipse, then wrenched from the larynx with a claw-hammer. There’s “Revolution Train”, whiplash synths, conspiracy power-theory, burning flags, caged migrants, Lenin’s sealed train carrying the virus of insurrection across Europe…
(International Times, November 2016)
Stimmlich hat sich Peter Hope diesmal ein wenig zurück genommen bzw. tritt nicht ganz so „Straßenköter“ mäßig auf, wie zum Beispiel zuletzt noch mit den THE EXPLODING MIND. David Harrow beschränkt sich auf den insgesamt 10 Tracks von „Blue Electric“ voll und ganz auf elektronische Sounds und legt so ein pulsierend-flirrendes Fundament für die immer noch einzigartige Stimme von Peter Hope. Insbesondere macht sich dabei ein unterschwelligen Dub-Einfluß bemerkbar, welcher nicht weiter verwundert, wenn man weiß, das David Harrow seit Ende der 80er Jahre auch im Umfeld vom On-U Sound-Label anzutreffen ist. (...) Selbst wenn beim ersten Mal hören die rund 42 Minuten von „Blue Electric“ ein wenig an einem vorbei rauschen sollten, bitte dem Album eine weitere Chance geben, denn spätestens nach einigen Durchläufen zündet es definitiv!
(Black Magazin, February 2017)
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